Answers to application questions for the 2018 Code for America Community Fellowship application submitted on behalf of Open Savannah
View the Project on GitHub opensavannah/community-fellowship-sav-brief
Name of primary applicant: Carl V. Lewis
**Email: **carl@opensavannah.org
cv.carlvlewis.net
resume.carlvlewis.net
https://carlvlewis.github.io
Brigade Role: Founder, Co-Captain
Predominant Skillsets:
To confirm these details additionally, Saja Aures, the Director of the City of Savannah Office of Public Information, can also be contacted, as she serves on Open Savannah’s advisory board. saures@savannahga.gov
In Savannah, our civic bank account has been depleted, and trust in local government has reached historic lows.
As a result of an unplanned $12 million revenue shortfall, funding for social services and nonprofit initiatives for the vulnerable (SSP grants) was reduced by approximately 40 percent in 2018, from $1.2 million to less than $800,000.00. The city defunded the Rape Crisis Center altogether; it closed its Entrepreneurial Center altogether. It also disbanded its Women and Minority Small Business Program. It goes without saying that many residents weren’t happy about the cuts.
Then, two weeks ago, it was announced that the City actually ended its fiscal year with a surplus of $10 million, meaning that the cuts to social programs were esssentially unnecessary.
What we face on both sides is a disconnect in understanding and contextualizing budget operations and resident desires for spending. We’ve done projects such as openbudgetsav.org, but more than that will be needed to restore the civic bank account to a positive balance. To reach those most affected by social safety net programs, it will take more than a visualization. It wil take a multipronged process.
The very first time I ever met with City Hall when starting Open Savannah, participatory budgeting was mentioned as a dream project for the City so that constituents would understand why things work the way they do. That was 13 months ago.
The conversation has continued, but the 2018 budget fiasco mentioned above made it difficult to implement this year as the budget itself wasn’t even made public online until after it had been voted on.
It was not, in my opinion, any attempt at ill-will, but rather the result of a radical restructuring of city departments combined with a costly demerger of police forces from Chatham County. And a gap in communication.
We’ve met three times so far with the Office of Budget since the Community Fellowship was announced. We’ve also visited four neighborhood associations to gather resident feedback **92 percent of those we surveyed think a participatory budget process would help restore the loss of civic trust,while 8 percent said that not even the strongest measures would convince them that city leaders aren’t in the pockets of developers. Additionally, 81 percent think it would save money overall by preventing duplicative services from being funded, and by creating an environment of open innovation that enables cost-saving projects pitched by, for and with residents.
(while this list is broad, we would identify a single user persona from this list on which to focus our engagement efforts during the design sprint at the start of the project)
It’s already secured!
Sure, participatory budgeting may not be a new idea, but to my knowledge, this will be the largest PB project in terms of share of overall budget in U.S. history. Moreover, we are committed to making this an equitable process that takes active measures to reach people who historically haven’t voted in municipal elections. Open Savannah has a very strong relationship with the entire Coastal Georgia civic ecosytem. Our Neighborhood Lead attends meetings on our behalf; our advisory board holds positions of influence; and we’ve focused our first year on building relationships before apps. Process over product.
Moreover, if succesful, the City would no doubt repeat the project in future years, especially if it improves their re-election chances. As the editor of Connect Savannah put it, our local leaders are desperate to the point of historic measures to regain the public’s trust after the budget travails of the past two years and a growing “civil war” over gentrification and development projects.
I think most of the team I’ve had the opportunity to meet already, but here goes it:
I’m a longtime data journalist and digital editor with a master’s degree in data and computational journalism from Columbia University who quit the professional journalism industry 1.5 years ago so that I might have a greater impact outside of the newsroom –– where false balance matters often more than fact. I moved to Savannah 15 months ago after being in disbelief at the 2016 national election and the role my profession abandoned in the pursuit of pleasing the public rather than informing the public. I left my job at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch with little other plans but to take on B.I. and mobile app work in Savannah, where I held my first job out of grad school as digital editor of Savannah Morning News. I was struck by the lack of available public data for a city of its size (~500,000 population).
So, I started a Meetup group. Before I knew it, I was leading a kickoff meeting before 75 residents who all shared my concerns. Thus, Open Savannah was born. And, boy, has it taken off!
I believe clear, nuanced communication between public sector actors and the residents who they serve is essential for healthy cities and healthy democracies , and that the problem breeding mistrust between city and citizen in 2018 is fundamentally a communication one (in addition to a cultural one). The procurement process is broken. Public trust is historically abysmal. Bureaucracy, which is a good thing in its purest form, has piled up so much over time that it now is part of the problem often. People feel like their voices don’t matter. This breeds cynicism. This breeds mistrust. This leads us to vote for “anti-establishment” candidates who fecklessly proclaim to dismantle the institutions that have made our nation great. Democracy, while imperfect, is is in serious peril when this happens, and inefficient digital services are not only costly, but they disproportionately affect those living in the margins of our communities.
While we may not be able to fix the entirety of the broken system alone, together we can pull levers that help create positive microinteractions that make interacting with government not a pain or necessitating a day off work without paid leave just to qualify for the social safety net.
We can make this work. We just have to approach it right and be leaders who do more than just code (but code is important too!).
Collaboration has been the key to Open Savannah’s success so far, and I would argue its most killer app.
Take a look at our leadership team and advisory board (https://opensavannah.org/who-we-are). Just our leadership alone is a powerhouse of local civic and local emerging technology and public sector movers-and-shakers.
As for the project team, I put out an open call for PB project volunteers two weeks ago. We’ve already received 32 interested volunteers, and 12 interested fellows from expert backgrounds.
We’ve met to discuss skills, needs, roles, etc., and we feel the following individuals would make strong fellows (including one who happens to be the guy who created Homebrew; no big!).
Brigade Members Who’ve Expressed Interest in this Project -Joshua Nichols, Senior Applications Engineer at Github and Open Savannah volunteer. -Kevin Lawver, CTO, Planted. Open Savannah Advisory Board. -Coco Papy, Community Director, The Creative Coast. Open Savannah Advisory Board. -Nichelle Stephens, gnattysavannah.com. Brigade Member -Hernan Maestre, Brigade Member. Winner of #hack4sav. UI Designer. -Aaron Pompei of Pompei & Co. - Service Design Agency. Open Sav Core Team Member. -Yvonne Joffrault, Founder, TourBuddy Apps -Casey Herrington - Founder of hdgem.com. Medtech resource consultancy for HD. -Nick Palumbo - Founder ofSmart Growth Savannah. City Council Candidate, Open Savannah’s Neighborhood Lead. -Lizann Roberts - Director, Coastal Georgia Indicators Coalition, Open Savannah Advisory Board. -Rob Lingle - Founder, oak.works. Brigade Co-Captain. Engineering. -Brian Young, Senior Product Manager at United Nations International Development Center, remote tech worker in Savannah. Open Savannah Core Team Member. Technical Product Manager -Caila Brown, Assistant Director, Savannah Bicycle Campaign. Open Savannah Core Leadership Team Member. -Brittany Andrews - Founder of Savannah’s newly-formed “Girls Who Code” chapter; winner of #hack4sav 2017. Design, front-end. -Max Howell, Co-Founder of Codebase, creator of popular Homebrew package manager. Engineering -Clinton Edminster, Founder, Starlandia Supply. Illustrator and graphic designer. Design, front-end. -InkyBrittany – Award-winning and rising star in information visualization by sketching. She visually documents all group meetings. PRO BONO. -Cam Mathis, Director, Information Technology, City of Savannah -Gary Skoglind - Full-Stack Developer, Open Savannah Operations Lead -Terri Jones, Grocery clerk by day, volunteer poverty fighter 24/7. Recent graduate of Leadership Savannah who is spearheading a shuttle program to help downtown workers commute from their residence to their place of employment. -Amanda Hollowell - Community Organizer with focus on Minority Outreach. -Marcus Howelll - Founder of ProjectMQ, indie game developer
We currently have around 25-30 people attend our biweekly community action nights from a diversity of backgrounds, not counting Core Leadership. We operate the largest Meetup group in Coastal Ga. (302!) other than the ‘Resistance’ political grassroots movement that has 459 members. Our mailing list has 479 unique email addresses. And our weekly presence in the daily newspaper further diversifies the new members who we never knew called Savannah home.
All of that is to say we have never have much difficulty finding people to offer their hands up. So, we see the Brigade filling in much of the locality knowledge gaps, as well as working as time permits on the project directly as a volunteer. We do all projects without silos, free of hierarchy, and adhere to disciplined sprints. All members may receive free agile design and development via Ga Tech Savannah’s campus that meets at Bull Street Labs. Our sponsor Codebase also offers iOS courses for free to Brigade members, and the Creative Coast just received a grant from Google to start a Girls Who Code chapter to work in tandem with us.
A city’s annual municipal budget is said to be the truest reflection of its values. In 2018, the municipal budget in Savannah acted as a catalyst for fomenting widespread citizen distrust and an even more intractable divide between city and citizen.
Given the opportunity to have a say over all $200 million is an accomplishment we are proud the City has entrusted us to carry out in collaboration with them.
Furthermore, given the robust game developer ecosystem in Savannah, we have a unique opportunity to add gamification to the digital component of the project.
And before the wounds heal regarding the draconian measures taken in 2018, it will be difficult to bridge the city-citizen divide.
For this empowerment-oriented PB project, we’re tentatively budgeting the following roles would be needed:
Project Kickoff: June 1, 2018 Project Finish: Sept. 1, 2018 Public Comment Period: Sept. 1-30 Handed to City Officials to Vote: Oct. 1
Note: Missed earlier template in GSheets; will convert to a spreadsheet and add here